1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an imaging device and an imaging method with a white balance correction as well as to a computer readable storage medium in which a program to allow a computer to execute a white balance correction is stored.
2. Description of the Related Art
There has been a widely used technique in the field of an imaging device to determine a light source of uniform light in an entire captured image and perform the same level of a white balance correction on the entire image. However, a problem may arise in this technique when a captured image is illuminated with different kinds of light sources that a proper white balance correction on the entire image is not feasible so that a generated image may include color shifts.
In view of solving such a problem, Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2002-271638 discloses a technique to prevent color shifts in the entire image by dividing a captured image into small areas and performing white balance correction on each of the small areas, for example. Also, Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2005-347811 discloses a more advanced white balance correction technique to perform white balance correction on each pixel in order to resolve color shifts in a boundary of the small areas, for example.
Meanwhile, from another point of view, images having undergone uniform white balance correction may include color shifts as described above but these images look very familiar to users. To the contrary, images resulted from different levels of white balance correction on the respective small divided areas by the above two techniques include less color shifts, however, users are not familiar with these images, and may feel unnaturalness to them. Thus, the white balance correction techniques in the above references are to correct a white portion in each of the small areas in accordance with a type of light source so that it is to be represented in pure white. This results in generating images which may look unfamiliar to users.